The knockout was delivered Christmas day;
a brawl was done that passed just like a dream.
Your final bout had ended up this way:
against the ropes and losing all your steam.
Though facing your opponent toe to toe,
the sucker-punch already had been thrown.
You found yourself down fallen, like the snow;
a ten-count wouldn’t stop or be postponed.
Your gloves came off when fighting this last round.
The winter cancer boxed you in the ring
and grew so fast, despite the frozen ground.
Those pounds you lost left featherweight to swing.
Some boxers are considered tough and brave,
but you swung lionhearted at a grave.

Now trees don’t cast their shade, it follows me
and yellows light to fenced anemic hue.
The crooning brook, a dull menagerie:
discordant scales or fish beneath that blue
once fasinated me. Instead, I look
away and focus carefully on dim
horizons, leave the mayfly on the hook,
descending, dive for shadowed cool to swim.
Though still I wonder, what of paths untried;
the splash that I’ve kept thirsty in a dream.
The angled light viewed from the other side,
those might-have-beens that never may be seen.
A transient color stalks the fragile hour,
then quietly it occupies each flower.﻿

Unwinding, hissing, passing eons out,
ballooning flapped, elastic: time’s disease.
The years deflated under winter drought,
while oceans were reduced to antifreeze.
Through complicated wars of circumstance,
in heat and dust, a few survived. Though stiff
at first, our body-language did advance
and printed verse became a hieroglyph
and sneezed. Exotic font and serif said
it all, to modern scholars looking back
from Times New Roman, Palatine, instead
of Courier, Papyrus, Copper Black.
The future pouring over poems found
the curvature of letter minus sound.

Possessing not the insight found in time,
that wraps a journey unaware, and claps
inaudibly in cadence, fractal rhymes.
We yawp, express this life in tattered scraps
of what we feel and map what seems so new,
but is it fresh or just repeated strolls;
the human gait still searching for a clue.
Insisting on rewriting former scrolls
of dead ideas there inked by bygone blooms
of us. Immersed and yoked with joy and pain,
the wonder of encounters since the womb,
our consciousness evovles beyond the brain.
Alive, unchaperoned and forth we go,
from youth through death recalling what we know.